Before Alabama shooting, Amy Bishop was far from her roots in Braintree

The Alabama neighborhood where Amy Bishop, her husband James Anderson and their children moved in 2003 is very different from the leafy street lined with Victorian-era homes near Braintree Square where Bishop grew up. Yet the communities are drawn together by a pair of tragedies. In 1986, Bishop shot her brother to death i...

Years before that fateful Friday in February, Amy Bishop chose a different place to call home.

The southeast Huntsville subdivision where Bishop, her husband James Anderson and their children moved in 2003 is very different from the leafy street lined with Victorian-era homes near Braintree Square where Bishop grew up.

The lots on McDowling Drive and adjoining streets are large and sunny, unlike those of the tidy, well preserved old houses of Hollis Avenue.

Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the McDowling Drive neighborhood is filled with two-story frame houses like Bishop’s, along with brick ranches and the occasional faux Tudor and stucco exterior – the Sun Belt homes of working families and retirees.

Opposite the Bishop home is Scarlett O'Hara Circle, named for the heroine of Margaret Mitchell's novel ‘‘Gone With The Wind.’’

The former Bishop home on Hollis Avenue is just a short walk from Braintree Square. McDowling Drive is about as far south as you can go and still be in the city, with the ridge of Green Mountain just out of sight beyond the tree line.

Bishop's Huntsville home is as far from the University of Alabama-Huntsville campus, where she taught biology, as Braintree is from Boston.

For all the differences, the 45-year-old biology professor's neighbors are in much the same mood these days as those in Braintree were in 1986, after Bishop shot her younger brother Seth Bishop to death.

In February, shot six of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, killing three.

Longtime residents like Faye Chassay of adjoining Green View Drive are still shocked by the campus killings and still trying to cope with seeing a side of Bishop that no one suspected was there.

‘‘I had trouble thinking about anything else for a couple of days,’’ Chassay said of Bishop's alleged murder of three of her colleagues on Feb. 12.

Another Green View resident said he and others rarely saw Bishop or her husband. "We pretty much keep to our own business,’’ he said. But they never imagined her doing such a thing, either.

Chassay, who lives a block from the Bishop home, was among the few who had any personal contact with her. About a year ago she asked to talk with Bishop when one of the children tipped over her trash barrel. Chassay and Bishop shared a Coke and chatted for 45 minutes.

‘‘It was very normal,’’ the retired FBI clerk recalled.

Chassay was quickly impressed by Bishop's intelligence – though she thought it odd that Bishop told her right away that she had a doctoral degree.

While she and everyone else await a murder indictment for the campus murders, neighbors and people across Huntsville are following reports from Massachusetts about the Seth Bishop shooting and Quincy District Court Judge Mark Coven's inquest with equal intensity.

Page 2 of 2 - ‘‘If that case hadn't been swept under the rug, this might not have happened,’’ one Huntsville neighbor said of the UAH shootings.

An indictment could be months away. Madison District Attorney Robert Broussard couldn't be reached for comment on Friday. With all parties under a gag order, no one else can say much about the case.

Bishop's attorney, Roy Miller of Huntsville, says she is off a suicide watch and has ‘‘good days and bad days’’ as a regular inmate in the Huntsville-Madison County Metro Jail.

Miller and Deputy Sheriff Chris Stephens couldn’t provide details about Bishop's activities, but Stephens said female inmates typically live dorm-style, with as many as 60 in a unit. (The jail currently has about 150 female inmates and some 900 male inmates.)

Inmates like Bishop get at least an hour of exercise each day, and are allowed 15-minute visits two days a week from family members or others who are on an approved visitor list. Since the jail is a short-term facility, Stephens said there are no counseling or other programs – only a jail ministry. Inmates have limited access to reading material.

Sometime this summer, Bishop and all other inmates will be transferred to a new $80 million jail adjacent to the current facility. The new jail is only three miles from the UAH campus – and a world away from both Braintree and McDowling Drive.